The commercial side, funded by the private sector, will be very important in the $100 billion NASA's plan to return to the moon. "I'm quite optimistic that privately funded science missions are going to be a wave of the future," said Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center.

The private enterprise on the moon could vary from astronomical telescopes to interactive television (photo) and virtual-reality tours to medical isotopes and fusion fuel.

NASA is planning to start human colonization of the moon by 2020. "The first thing that anyone's going to make money off of, from the moon, is probably going to be information of some kind," said Paul Spudis, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. "A huge entertainment/educational market that will develop around the lunar return," Spudis said.

"There is already a reasonable investment that's been made by a private group (International Lunar Observatory Association) for putting telescopes on the moon for scientific purposes, much in the way that private investors have built many of the large telescopes in the world," said Worden.

The idea is to send a 10-foot-high (3-meter-high) probe, fitted with a radio dish antenna as well as communication and power-generating equipment, to the moon. "The likeliest site would be Malapert Mountain near the lunar south pole. Based on two feasibility studies conducted by California-based SpaceDev, the mission could be done for $50 million, with a target date in the 2010 time frame," said Steve Durst, the organizer of International Lunar Observatory Association.

"Once humans start arriving on the moon, the commercial possibilities should accelerate rapidly," said Harrison Schmitt, the last astronaut who stepped on the moon on the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, now chairman of the NASA Advisory Council. "The sooner you can get your workers and support personnel and settlers, the better. That would lower your cost of extracting lunar resources, particularly those that you're going to bring back to Earth. So there's a very strong commercial bias toward having settlements begin almost immediately", added Schmitt.

He believes that lunar helium-3, a particular isotope abundant on the moon, is a potential fuel for future fusion reactors, better than the deuterium-tritium, for the first generation of fusion reactors, planned for decades away. "Helium-3 could come in handy even earlier for producing positron-emitting isotopes."

These isotopes are already employed for medical PET scanners, used for determining diagnostics. "The settlers are going to have a delightful time on the moon. Bounding along on the lunar surface, in gravity one-sixth of Earth's, is much like cross-country skiing," said Schmitt.

A slight toe-push sends you swiftly through the air for a few meters. "In fact, cross-country skiing would serve as great training for future lunar astronauts," added Schmitt.

Photo credit: Space Age Publishing